Unofficial news and tips about Google

September 28, 2012

Google Contacts Sync Using CardDAV

CardDav is an open standard for syncing contacts and it's closely related to CalDAV, a standard for synchronizing calendars. Google Calendar already supports CalDAV and now it's time for Google Contacts to add support for CardDAV.

If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad and you want to sync your data with a Google Account, you probably select "Gmail" from the list of accounts and you're disappointed to find out that you can only sync your mail, calendar and notes, not to mention that there's no push support. What about your contacts? A better option is to add a new account that uses Microsoft Exchange to sync. You can also manually add a CardDav account using these instructions, assuming that your device uses iOS 5 or iOS 6. If you need push support, the only option is to use Exchange.

"By supporting IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV together, we're making it possible for 3rd parties to build a seamless Google Account sync experience," says Google. There are many applications and services that support CardDav: Apple's Address Book from Mac OS X, Atmail, CardDAV-Sync for Android, Apple's iOS.